


What Man Dare, I Dare

by orphan_account



Series: those that awakened [2]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Ahch-To, Depression, Gen, Grief, Jedi Training, Luke-centric, Meditation, a lot of meditation to be honest, and needs a healthy coping mechanism, because Luke is dealing with some heavy stuff, kind of, more like re-training
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-08
Updated: 2017-03-08
Packaged: 2018-09-30 19:40:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10170356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Approximately four years before Rey shows up on Ahch-to, Luke makes an attempt at the healing process. It's not linear, but it's progress. He's desperate. He'll take what he can get.(Re-posted with revisions)





	

"One learns that the world, though made, is yet being made; that this is still the morning of creation; that mountains long conceived are now being born, channels traced for coming rivers, basins hollowed for lakes..."

\- John Muir

 

 

Luke shoots up from the ground, cries out in pain as tears blur his vision, and then immediately falls to his knees. He desperately shifts into a meditative stance, his body seeking peace. The death of Han streaks across his mind, freezing his breath, twisting the muscles in his chest. He pulls his clenched fists up to his face and presses his knuckles into his eyes. There isn’t a thread of reality that makes sense to him anymore. His sanity is lost.

 A breeze blows through his hut and the moist sea air cools the lines of sweat on his forehead and chest. In the scent of the ocean he can smell fish, algae, briny stone, and the heat of life. The island is steadfast against the clash of waves. The roots of grass pulse as they dig deeper and deeper and deeper…

 He returns from his meditation slowly.

 Han is dead.

 ~

 When Luke first arrived on Ahch-to, he was instantly reminded of his childhood landscape; horizons observable and a merciless sun.

 “Here,” he had said to that vast emptiness, to the nobodies inhabiting the island. “Here I’ll be safe.”

 Safe from himself, safe from others, safe _to_ others…

 The semantics at that point had barely mattered to him. All he wanted was to be essentially safe in every way conceivable, essentially  _something_  he had not felt in some millennia.

For six years, Luke had been on the run. For six years he had been in a desperate flight from a galaxy that was simply too big for him. For six years, he had stayed just ahead of the wave of pain and sorrow, threatening to consume him and corrupt his power. He had traveled across nearly every system, working as a mechanic, a bar tender, a cargo pilot, an engineer, and sometimes just sat on a corner in a seedy little town, destitute and exhausted, a beggar praying for an end. Luke spent six years attempting to unmake himself and to slowly deconstruct his identity, until he was something new.

For six years he had not been a Jedi, had closed his mind, in the hopes that somehow he would find peace. But all it did was leave a strict binding on his thoughts and contain his ability to sense or feel anything. He found he was losing precious memories of his family, growing numb to the cruelest of actions, and edging closer to the darkness he needed so desperately to transcend – for his sake and for the sake of the galaxy. He needed a place to reach inside himself again, and this lonely ancient island, the first Jedi Temple at last, seemed a good place to do it.

 The first night there, he had prayed in silence for the memory of his Aunt and Uncle, praying in the way of Jedi for the first time in half a decade. All night he knelt over the cliffside, calling forth their names from the conscious ‘other’ of the Force, the unnamable blue land from where Obi-Wan and others had many times spoken. In the morning, dawn broke over his face and he knew the island had been blessed with their strength and care. As the sun rose, he recognized that old feeling of being protected (a feeling he had found somewhat stifling in his steadier youth), and under the spiritual memory of his long deceased guardians, he fell apart for the first time in decades.

 Piece by piece.

 His body shook, he could feel his bones quaking beneath his skin, he could smell the edges of his hair burning at the tips, and old scars on his body - long since healed - reopened and bled.

 But on that island, under the solid blessing of Beru and Owen, under the compassion of thousands of years of Jedi souls, sheltered by the immensity of the ocean and its thick salty air, his immense power, quaking and destructive, was felt only by him. That had been the reason for his self-imposed exile, of course. He had done the right thing. His pain and its power would corrupt no one.

The dawn was cold on his face. His tears ran in a silent stream down his cheeks and nose. Crying was a miserable relief.

 

~

 

The next thing he did was search for the entrance of the Temple. He could feel its presence beneath his feet as he crested the steep hills of the island, but he couldn’t figure out how to get in. After a several hours of walking up and down the rough inclines and pushing through the dunes on the island’s north side, he was prepared to push the hunt off for tomorrow. He’d been silently shedding tears throughout the morning, unconsciously, and filtering old memories, let loose in his mind once more. He was emotionally exhausted and Owen and Beru’s blessing was like a warm blanket – coaxing him into a long and healing sleep.

Just as he was about to climb back up into his ship, a burst of blue light splashed across his path, very much the same hue of the force spirits he’d encountered. It bounced in front of him a few times then started to float in the direction of the crumbling stairs on the cliff. He followed it, of course, without hesitation.

It led him up the stairs about halfway, before turning abruptly and bouncing brightly across one of the lower hillsides. Luke struggled to keep up, his boots unable to find good purchase on the steep hill, the grass still slippery with dew. When he caught up to the little light, it was hovering under the shade of large mossy boulder situated among many.

Somehow, Luke knew what to do without prompting.

He reached out a hand in front of him and reconnected with the Force – establishing that connection that was now so foreign yet so familiar. His power rushed through him and he closed his eyes against the wave, clenching his jaw under the strain to contain it. Shakily, he focused it on the boulder. He touched it with the Force, greeted the vibrant moss inhabiting the weathered stone, and then asked it to move.

It shot into the sky and imploded. Luke had just enough time to throw an arm over his head before he was showered with small stones and charred moss. There was an nervous squawk of birds nearby and the distant sound of a host of wings suddenly starting to flap at once. Then there was a moment of heavy quiet while the world settled down.

He raised his eyes to the little blue light, horrified by what he had just done. The light just bounced around happily a few times in front of an exposed carved doorway in the mountain side. It was clearly not carved by nature.

Luke stared at the entrance and felt a thousand sobs building up in his throat as he surveyed the debris of his destruction. He raised his mechanical hand to his mouth as the light circled around his ankles and then darted through the ancient door to the Temple, inviting him in.

Luke turned on his heel and walked away.

That night he couldn’t sleep. Nor the night after.

The blessing of his Aunt and Uncle wasn’t strong enough to keep him safe.

 ~

Luke mourned for weeks. He mourned for months. He avoided the Temple and instead focused on surviving.

He gently placed his grief into every action, situated pain on his hands so he felt it when he gathered kindling, sparked a fire; when he ground clay and sand together to patch up an ancient hut; when he wound traps for fishing, sharpened stones for carving; when he laid out his clothes after a thorough washing. He ate grief with his mealy legumes and dried salted fish and old nutrition packs stored on his ship.

He felt that it was his responsibility to feel, just as it was his responsibility to feel it alone. As he always had from the beginning. With love comes pain. To deny one is to deny the other. To deny one part of reality is to deny reality as a whole. From the moment he had followed Obi-Wan from the burned corpses of his family he had assumed the raw deal of obligation; obligation to everything.

 He shed tears for his students, their innocence and curiosity and pureness of emotion - always one extreme or the other, but so changing and mutable that they gained wisdom quickly. He didn’t have to do much more than provide a framework for their free minds to use as they explored the boundless universe and roamed the depth of the force. Their compassion came easily, for they  _wanted_  a world built on empathy. He shed tears for his sister and the ways that she had to be strong for an ungrateful world and how that made her a fighter before anything else; her struggle would always be a war that no one else was willing to see. He shed tears for his daughter.

 For his daughter he grieved the most.

What he had lost with the loss of her -

 There was no healing. That would remain raw until every star grew cold.

~

Luke avoided sleep as well, whenever he could. He felt as if he was walking on a hair-thin line, tip toeing across a vast chasm that boiled and splashed with all the hate and resentment other people were allowed to fall into – but not him. He had to walk the line.

He was fragile. Every moment of every day he was on the verge of tears. He had thought, naively, that once he allowed himself to grieve after six years of feeling nothing at all, it would be a relief. But the struggle to eat, to clean his clothes, his body, the struggle to live was now foregrounded in his mind and it was exhausting.

Yoda would lecture him.

“Go to the Temple, you must,” he would tell Luke calmly as Luke sat on the beach trying to think of nothing at all and blind himself with the sun’s reflection on the water.

Obi-Wan would stand over Luke when he lay on the cramped cot in his ship, blanket over his head, wishing he had never come to the island to confront his pain. He would tell Luke pointless tales for as long as he could stay, about the Wars and being a young Padawan in the days of old. If he was trying to give some cryptic non-advice, per usual, Luke wasn’t paying close enough attention to get it.

Anakin would just follow him around, sit silently by his side or walk a distance behind him as Luke aimlessly traveled from one end of the island to the other. Anakin didn’t really know how to handle loss, his only attempts in his own life being ultimately self-destructive, and had no wise words to give to Luke.

Luke ignored them all.

He knew without their hints that he had to restart his training again. Long bouts of exhaustive meditation were not enough for him to fully regain control of his powers. But even the thought of stepping in that hallowed Temple made him dizzy and truly frightened him. It gave him that same irrepressible surge of terror in his gut that he first felt as he stared into the flames viciously ripping apart his school. 

After months of this, of presence only through pain, of self-hood made only of shed blood, of hearing Leia’s desperate pleas echoing in his mind each night ( _she needed him there, with her, she needed to find him, where was he)_  Luke was raw and starving. More malnourished than he had ever been in the six years of poverty from before and so overwhelmed by his own mind that he frequently found himself lost in places on the island he had no memory of walking; waist deep in the ocean, dangling his legs over a bluff on a cliff, digging a deep hole in the beach for no discernible reason – bloodied hands, stars above, and just cold, wet sand being exposed to the night with each mindless scoop.

 _This isn’t healthy,_ he would think, watching the blood drip from his knuckles onto the shimmering sand below. _This isn’t why I came here._

He had a responsibility to cure this illness. He couldn’t be what was needed if even the slightest hint of suffering made the tips of his hair start to burn, if his broken heart couldn’t contain itself and leaked out into the real world, abusing the Force by lashing out in destruction.

So one typical morning after a few months on the island, with no particular new motivating factor, he walked determinedly into the ancient temple, his bare feet disturbing ancient layers of dust and his breaths echoing around the enormous dark room, he sat under the highest ceiling of the temple and tried to gain control,  _control_. He strained with every inch of his mind to rein in the wave. He tried to hold the Force, not be held by it.

 “Do or do not, there is no try,” Yoda’s ghost said, appearing in front of him in the gloomy hall.

 That, ultimately, had been the moment that doomed him.

“Perhaps _you_ should’ve _tried_ a little harder!” Luke burst out, finally letting go of the beast he had caged when his daughter was stolen from him. “Then maybe none of this would’ve happened!”

He felt himself fall off the thin line. Bitterness and hate and resentment and pure destructive heat was eating up his soul. He was rage. He was anger. Every breath he breathed was fire.

 Luke unleashed it all.

The ancient architecture only withstood the waves of his power through the influence of its Jedi history, but the hills above the temple groaned and their grasses caught on wildfire. The atmosphere sparked with charge and the air dried, moisture seized and expelled far out over the sea. The rich muddy earth chapped and cracked and bled magma. Luke, through the tormented red of his emotion, noticed his own prosthetic dripping thick blood, the cauterized wound, that had closed instantly upon its formation, bleeding for the first time. His rage grew in the memory of his father. As if summoned, Anakin’s ghost stepped into his line of sight -

 “You must remain calm,” he said. “My son, you must -”

 Luke would rather die than hear another word from the man- he waved his right arm and Anakin vanished with a shocked shout. Some part of him was suddenly alarmed at this ability to dismiss a Jedi ghost and he latched onto that alarm, feeling that was the way back to sanity and control. He forced his untethered mind to remember Leia and her pleas, the voices of his students calling out for help, the betrayed and terrified face of Rey as he left her, the whole galaxy of fighters and beings wishing for peace in war - He needed to be compassionate - he needed to suffer with - to ground himself in life – he had to walk the line –

That’s when he felt the soft touch of a strong hand on his brow.

 ~

He opened eyes he hadn’t realized he had closed and then felt the world shift. The walls of the trembling temple shimmered and became the muted colors of his childhood home, the roar of the wind and sea faded away into the immersive silence of the desert, and he felt the heavy history of his life lift from his body - old aches and injuries vanish - and he looked down at the skin of his arms made anew. His right hand was flesh and blood and young.

A giant woman sat in front him, mirroring his kneeled position, a small quirk of a smile on her lips and sad serious eyes looking down on him. He realized at once that she wasn’t giant, only that he was small.

 “Hello,” she said.

 “Hello,” Luke replied in a quiet voice, high pitched and childlike.

 She grinned down at him, looking very much like Leia.

 “Hello,” she repeated, delighted.

 In the back of Luke’s mind he knew this wasn’t real, that he was a middle-aged man sitting in a cave close to crumbling, half out of his mind, on his way to a Dark he had never known - yet most of Luke’s awareness was here, in this body, unconscious of the Force and his history. His mind was as childlike as his voice. So when a friendly, familiar woman grinned at him, he, light-hearted, grinned back.

“Hello,” he said, giggling at the silly game.

She raised her arms and held them open.

“May I?” she asked and Luke ached at once for a hug. He launched himself into her arms, wrapping his own around her neck and the smooth braids running down her back. She scooped his small body up and squeezed. He was pressed against her warmth and could feel the rumblings of her laughter against his chest and stomach.

 “Oh, Luke, my son,” she whispered. “You’re such a beautiful boy.”

 e pulled back, still grinning and giggling, to look at her serious eyes again. She brought a hand up to his face and lovingly pushed back his messy hair from his forehead. Luke suddenly recognized her face from some old holos of a queen of Naboo. This was his mother. _Beautiful, but sad._

 “I wish I could’ve seen you like this,” she said. “I wish I could’ve heard your laugh.”

Luke frowned and brought his own hand up to touch her nose and cheek.

 “Don’t be sad,” he said. “Hello,” he entreated, hoping the game would make her smile again.

 “Hello, Luke, darling.” She smiled and Luke felt triumphant. “I’m sorry we never were able to meet.”

 “It’s okay,” he said.

 “I wish I could take care of you properly,” she said, pulling his legs out from under him and catching him in the cradle of her arms. He giggled as she showered his face with kisses and one of her hands tickled his sides. He felt warm with her joy and the safety of his family’s home.

 “It’s okay,” he said again, when she relented and he had caught his breath. “I can take care of myself.”

 She was sad again but her smile was proud.

 “I’m here, Luke,” she said quietly, under the echoes of their laughter from moments before. “I’m here and I believe in your goodness. Do you understand?”

 He nodded, but he didn’t really understand.

 “I believe in your goodness because you are my little boy, I made you and held you and gave you life. You have taken on the burden of thousands, the burden of the Balance, the burden of the Last and the First, but you will never belong to anyone more than you belong to me. I will always be with you and your sister.  _This_ water is thicker than blood.”

Luke was growing colder and the muted walls were fading but her eyes were clear and bright as day. She was smiling still, full of love and happiness. Luke felt his own smile grow, and for a moment he didn’t know fear, had no understanding of even the concept. All he knew was his mother and her strong embrace.

“Let go, darling,” she continued in that same quiet voice. “Let go. You are my boy. You are a grieving father. You are a man. You are limited. You end with the boundary of your skin and you don’t have to be anymore than that. Nothing more and nothing less.”

 Her face and body were ringed in a golden light.

 “Hello, Luke,” she said, laughing in delight. “I named you.”

 Luke didn’t understand what she was saying but he could see that his time with her was vanishing. He surged up and clung to her shoulders while she squeezed his protesting ribs.

“I love you,” he said. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

 “I love you,” she replied. “As big as the starry sky.”

 ~

The temple had gone still, the cavernous walls no longer under threat of demolition. He could hear the fire raging above him, feel the life of the grass and soil giving up in the flames. Luke breathed once, then twice. As he watched his moist breath curl through the stagnant dry air, he realized that things can’t remain broken forever. Change will occur, Nature will happen.

 He hung his graying head and cried.

 The storm clouds above the island pulsed and released the rain, the wind blew again, and the scent and protection of the sea returned.

 He wished he could hold Rey.

 ~

 His ship had been crushed by some falling rocks of his accidental bit of annihilation. Though reparable, it would take years to get it up and running again. In a burst of petty frustration he dropped a few extra boulders on it, making his self-exile complete. He trusted that Leia would be able to find him with Artoo’s help, if he was truly needed. He’d already sent Artoo the last portion of his map. Anything else was now truly beyond his control.  _What’s a few more years of absence, anyway,_ he thought,  _when I’ve already been gone six._

He started to rebuild the Jedi training in his mind, shattered to pieces by the death of his students and daughter. For six years, he had only built walls around the wounds and ruins; all that had accomplished was self-sabotage and destruction. His control was weak, his emotions high-strung and stressed, and his trust in the Force had to regrow, from the beginning.

He meditated frequently in the ashen field his pain had burned. Though the wildfire had never reached the forested land below the apex of the hill, the grassy plain had been full of life and its destruction was still a loss. He meditated in the crispy soil, nearly barren, summoning old memories of rain and bursts of growth in springtime.

 As is the way of Nature, the earth started anew in a few months’ time. First mosses lent their rich scent to his breath, soaking in his exhales. They paved the way for hardy sprouts and their flowers. The ocean just beyond blew in moisture and sunlight peaked past gray clouds to warm the newly muddy plain. The stone, once scorched, wore soft green and yellow lichen. Life pulsed and breathed. Insects started to sing.

Luke put himself back together, day by day. He had nearly reached a point of no return in his Force abilities and he painfully drew himself back to his body, to the physicality of his own life and self.

The ancient temple, excepting the grand hall, was pure ruins – though, fortunately for his peace of mind, it had become that way through time and neglect, not his own brief breakdown.

He walked gently through the halls of the past, looking for an understanding that had long since eluded his self-education in the Jedi ways. Most rooms and halls he found were much like the first. If there had been carving or decorative reliefs, they had long since washed away with rain and wind and the crumbling habit of rock. The walls were always cool and wet to the touch, the stairs traveled deep beneath the surface of the island (a few even leading to the shore), and the Jedi consciousness he had felt the moment he stepped off his ship months ago never got louder than the wispy breezes on his ear. He had been to many ancient Jedi sites over the years, but this was a different type of old. This was the kind of old one felt at the base of a mountain or on a space walk with a nebula in sight. It was very nearly the kind of old that he thought belonged solely to the stars.

 After a week and a half of exploring, he found a room with clear writing on the wall. It was a circular room, halfway below the mountainous surface to the sea, with windows covered in fresh moss. A few birds had selected it for their nests.

The words he couldn’t read, the characters of the language completely foreign and incomprehensible. He briefly thought of asking Yoda, Obi-Wan or his father for assistance, but quickly dismissed it. Their Jedi Order fell. It was unsustainable, even in the reformed practice of Luke’s own Jedi school. Their wisdom could not replenish the wells inside him or fill in the gaps of Jedi history. This was the  _first_ temple, the very beginning. Whatever was learned here, discovered here, was originary. It wasn’t even seed, it was soil.

The images accompanying the writing, unlike the words, were clear if cryptic. He knew what was being depicted but he didn’t know why: lightsaber forms, but no lightsabers. Each image was a humanoid being engulfed in a wave, or perhaps a burst of light – it was a depiction of pure energy, he knew that much. The images of the wave or light shifted incrementally and beneath each new form, the humanoid shifted, too, in mimicry. The pattern repeated, the energy and the humanoid body equally malleable, as they were depicted in the weathered and solid stone. Each image was just slightly different from every other one around it, and Luke, stepping back, was able to recognize a familiarity of shape in the lightsaber forms first learned by younglings, the forms that first taught younglings how to trust their bodies and the Force as it acts through them.

Luke dropped his cloak and lightsaber in the doorway and started to mimic the forms. He followed the curves of the images as they ran around the room in continuous circles, winding in layers, starting from the top of the ceiling by a window, until they finally met in the center of the floor. The complete cycle took Luke nearly an hour to complete, but the exercise felt wholesome and didn’t scare him away from his own body.

The last image was that of a humanoid kneeling in meditation. Luke collapsed next to it, exhausted, and gazed out at the sunset on the horizon. A strangeness of being came over him, a feeling from years before, familiar. He had felt the same way as he gazed across the double sunset of Tatooine, longing for something intangible.

It was a singularity: the sun setting on a horizon of sand or water, and Luke gazing beyond the warm glow. He had imagined when he was younger that he could see past the horizons and the suns, past the boundaries of his human sight.

  _It’s an illusion, a fantasy,_ Luke said.  _All I’m seeing is the sun._

_~_

Peace grew softly. Unobtrusively. It couldn’t grow any other way. Some days Luke woke from nightmares, tortured by the screams of those he loved and those he had never even met. Some days, going through the meditations and the forms was similar to dragging himself and Artoo through a swamp. Some days he was incapable of getting up. Even more, some days he felt the temptation of that destructive rage from before, that bitterness, that voice that would say, “ _This isn’t fair”,_ instead of saying “This isn’t just.”  _Moral Codes are not fictions, don’t let resentment poison them,_ he would remind himself.  _I am capable of pain because I am capable of love._ And then he would go tend to his garden or force-pull the waves on the shore.

The soil was cool to the touch on his skin but warm when he opened his touch to the force. He could practically hear the machinations of life burbling in each soft handful. If he closed his primary senses, the moist dirt of the forest and the saline water of the ocean felt the same, so full of life and accepting of change and so dependent on balance…

Some days he was even happy, in a limited sense. Desperation and sadness didn’t claw at his throat, his bones didn’t ache with stress, and his appetite for living and well-cooked fish was strong. Some days, the wind blew the hair off his face and he could feel his mother’s laughter against his chest, Owen’s protective hand on his shoulder, Beru’s proud smirk in his mind’s eye - he could feel Han’s embrace and Leia’s fingers entangled in his - he could feel Rey’s soft, downy hair, pressed under his chin - he could feel all this, and it didn’t break him. He could remember without drawing in shame and guilt.

One day, in the sparse field of new grass, atop the highest point of the island once more, a bird landed on his head while he sat in meditation. Unwilling to disturb it and even a little frightened it would fly away again, Luke became the essence of stillness. He reached out in the force for the experience of stone and sought to emulate such solidity.

Another bird soon joined the first. After a few minutes of deep concentration, Luke found himself surrounded by his feathered friends and splattered a bit with their feces. One bird took the brave plunge and landed on his lap. He met its eye as it twitched and hopped about in that avian way, unhappy on the ground. Struggling to contain his amusement and the laughter building up beneath his ribs, Luke breathed deep and called on the force to lift his body in the air.

Very slowly he rose. The birds perched on his shoulders, head, arms and knees were mostly unbothered, ruffling a few of their feathers but otherwise totally at peace with the new shift in altitude. He was floating perhaps his full height off the ground when three more birds landed on his lap. He wondered suddenly what Leia or Lando or Han would say if they could see him now. Hovering in the air, covered in at least a dozen cute birds, flicking their tails and poking through his hair.

He burst out laughing, the vision of their equally horrified, smirking, and baffled faces flooding his mind. The birds gave a collective indignant squawk as they leapt from what they thought was a silent floating stone, leaving more gifts of excrement behind. A few came back, even as he continued his obnoxious guffaws. He let himself drop back to the ground, forgetting to cushion the fall, so he could laugh in earnest. He could see the ghosts of Obi-Wan and Anakin attempting to catch his eye, but he ignored them.

He calmed down when he remembered Rey floating with him in a similar situation, her warm little body clinging to his neck but bravely looking down at the ground below, bravely trusting him with her safety. In the aftermath of such a comedic moment, a normally devastating memory became soft, painful yet cherished. As he washed his clothes later, he laughed again. Occasionally the chuckles turned to sobs, but it was mostly laughs.

  _Leia,_ he thought,  _will be delighted to learn about the lengths of time I’ve spent scrubbing bird shit off my clothes._

  _~_

 Rey had been dropped off on his doorstep, a few years after he had started the Jedi school. At first he had thought the parents were mistaken, that they were misinformed by information from the old Order, which forbid familial connections to the younglings once they had started training. He searched for them for a year. 

 He had searched for a year, but it had taken precisely one minute for him to adopt Rey in everything but name. He had lifted her into his arms and she had thrust her sticky, chubby hand into his mouth, fingers going up his nose, giggling like mad, smelling just a bit of soiled underclothes, and he had decided then and there he had never encountered so wonderful a person in all his days.

 It was exhausting taking care of a baby, but the exhaustion was such a different kind than Luke was used to experiencing, so full of the promise of commitment and family and love and legacy, that he was grateful for it - in between power naps. He wasn’t run ragged with battles and rescue attempts, flight training or strategy sessions. He was run ragged with an energetic spitfire who loved more than anything to swing from his shiny right hand or play nonsense games with a lot of running and shouting, who particularly loved the challenge of distracting Luke from his meditation by increasingly inventive means. (He was never really meditating, already thoroughly distracted from the moment she appeared in the room.) He traveled frequently, and would hold her in his lap every time they jumped to light speed, his heart glowing with her powerful glee. Luke had never imagined that flying could get better, but it did with Rey.

 Artoo adored her, of course. She wasn’t quick on picking up the binary, but, for possibly the first time in forever, Artoo didn’t mind. When Luke had to work, Artoo would lead her on treasure hunts or allow her to chase him in a game of tag. She had recognized Artoo’s unique consciousness immediately, without any guidance from Luke, making Luke more proud and in awe of her than he had ever been of anything.

 He found realness in struggling to feed her greens, in struggling to get her to go to bed on time, in struggling with her hair and her clothes and loud babbles and stories when he really needed to concentrate or sleep. She hated baths, thought boogers were hilarious and flatulence even more so and was an overall dirt-ball of a child who hated wearing shoes. He loved her for it, but by Force, it drove him mad. After she dirtied up the last of the pretty dresses he had made her, he had given up entirely on nice clothes, thinking,  _She certainly doesn’t take after me_ (an entirely nonsensical line of reasoning, but he was in love with being a father).

 She had asked him one night why one of his hands was shiny. Though he had started her force training a year before, she didn’t know much of his history. He didn’t allow her in the Jedi school - perhaps out of foresight, perhaps he was just being overprotective - and kept her monumentally secret from the public. To her, he was “dad” or, more frequently, “daaa _aaa_ aaad.” Or “father” when she had a question she felt was serious. Like now.

 “Father,” she began, making eye contact with him over her storybook.

 “Yes, daughter,” he said in an equally solemn tone, moving from his chair to sit beside her on the bed.

 “Why is one of your hands shiny?” she asked.

 Luke had a brief internal crisis in which one part of him moralized on the importance of honesty and the other started to list the merits wrapping Rey up in soft blankets and keeping her away from the world.

 “I lost my first right hand a long time ago,” he replied, hoping she wouldn’t be curious. In vain.

 “How?”

 “I was in a dangerous fight,” Luke said. “It’s a very long and complicated story that I won’t tell you right now, but I want you to know that I’m not in danger anymore and neither are you.”

 She looked keen on starting a protest but Luke made all her plush toys start dancing in mid-air and she was sufficiently distracted.

Also, he suspected, she really liked his shiny hand and didn’t want any story to poison her against it.

 ~

Time went by steadily. He kept track of the days, by both Ahch-to and Coruscant reckoning, but otherwise paid them little attention. Surviving took up most of the hours he was awake: finding and growing food, maintaining his water supply, fixing up his clothes and shelter. He chose life, committed to it, and on this wilderness island in the middle of a planet made mostly of sea, it required a concerted effort and most of his focus.

He enriched his relationship with the native birds, letting them rest on his shoulder and gifting them with scraps of cloth and clumps of his own hair for their nests. They seemed to appreciate the gesture, and a least several of them always hung nearby, as if they knew he needed the company.

One in particular must have taken a real liking to him, because it would attempt to gift Luke with nesting material in return, dropping in Luke’s outstretched hand some twigs or dried seaweed, before perching itself on top of Luke’s head. Luke suspected it just liked the warmth of his body, but feeling the bird’s little chest puff with each tiny breath against the crown of his head was the greatest new pleasure Luke had encountered in what was nearly a decade, so he was completely grateful either way.

Remarkably, this bird (who Luke had taken to calling Master Bird, or Master B for short), would find Luke when he was at his most fragile and lend its own warmth to Luke when he most needed it.

It was safe to say they were friends.

~

Luke trained his mind and body, not actively seeking to find any essential truths of the Jedi of old, but opening himself up to stumble upon discovery. He wasn’t racing against time here, trying to master a discipline before the galaxy falls under the oppressive thumb of a supreme evil power. He wasn’t learning for the sake of victory in war. The ultimate goal wasn’t to win. He was doing what he should’ve done long ago. He was studying for the sake of studying and he was taking his kriffing time while doing it.

 He knew that eventually he would be needed once more, that the galaxy was still under threat. But he also knew that the galaxy couldn’t rely solely on him to extinguish it. He was limited and mortal. Not only was this too great a burden for one man to bear, it was an untenable solution to the ultimate problem. He needed to train more Jedi.

 He needed to be healthy enough in his own force abilities to do it.

 He was still shaky most days, when he summoned his lightsaber to hand. He hadn’t ignited it since he had arrived on Ahch-to, only practicing his forms without the blade. He required meditation every day in order to stay afloat. Some days he couldn’t even lift a pebble with the force, and others he found if he concentrated enough, he could lift the island with his rage and grief. He hadn’t tried it. He didn’t want that sort of power.

Luke was starting to feel sympathy for Yoda, that old menace, in a surprising twist of fate. Before, he could not have imagined staying alive for as long as Yoda did, for the sole purpose of training the last hope for balance. Yet here he was, doing the same thing (only with a lot less pretension and moral relativism).

He couldn’t be the last Jedi, not when there were those who abused the force. There needed to be a check on that power of equal measure, not an aging man who could barely look at a lightsaber. Leia had long since rejected the Jedi path. There would have to be others. She would send them along, eventually. All he had to do was wait.

He was content with this. Grief was a constant companion but he was growing more and more familiar with presence of contentment, as well.

 All he had to do was wait.

 ~

Han was dead.

 ~

Han had been murdered. Luke knew it fiercely.

 Billions of lives had been snuffed from the galaxy, and Luke had felt their pain, panic, terror, fury and sudden absence like a suffocating blanket of blinding white-hot death. He had fainted in his hut from the pure pain of it. Inside of his mind he heard only the sound of lightning, cracking over and over and over, with no relief.

Then hours, or days, later (he didn’t know, he was delirious), he was awoken by a streak of Han across his inner vision: Han surprised, betrayed, dying, dead, all in the space of a few seconds.

 He should’ve been prepared for this, really. A couple days earlier, he had snapped out of his meditation because he felt a spark across the galaxy awaken in the force, bright and full of love and compassion, a spark he hadn’t encountered since he felt all of his students lose theirs. And nearly a day later, he had felt another join it. They were together, he could feel it in their joy, and the first experience of pure hope he’s had in possibly decades erupted in his heart. There was an awakening and they were strong. He wasn’t alone.

 But then there was a massacre of unprecedented size.

 And Han was dead.

He should’ve expected this. Things don’t always happen incrementally, like grass re-growing or rock turning to sand. They can happen in flashes, in blinks, all at once.

 Han was dead.

 ~

 The day after Han’s death, Luke broke his daily routine. He dressed in his Jedi robes, attached his lightsaber to his belt, and went to wait on the cliffside, blessed four years ago by Owen and Beru. The waves were their normal tumultuous selves, the sky shifting in the windy atmosphere from cloudy to blue to bright to a welcome shady gray. A few birds floated by him, greeting him in the avian way, and he meditated with his mind on the peace of dark soil, rich and full and warm.

Master Bird settled on his shoulder as he waited.

He felt Artoo first in the Force, followed instantaneously by Chewbacca. They burst into his senses, and he was overwhelmed by memory until he registered the spark (the second one) who was accompanying him. She felt familiar, like a scent in the air he’s almost forgotten he -

 Loved.

 His knees buckled and he coudn’t breathe. It couldn’t be. He would’ve known, he would’ve  _known,_ if she had survived. It was impossible. Improbable. Implausible.

  _This is too cruel,_ every voice in him cried,  _this is the cruelest thing of all. I can’t handle this. I am not built to withstand this._

 The ship landed and he would recognize those particular engines anywhere, more familiar than his own face.

 She was coming closer and he could now see the way she was masked in the force for so long. He could sense the layers of loneliness built up over every inch of her heart and skin. He managed to stand but tears began to prick his eyes. He could feel the vibration of her every step. He could hear her breath, growing heavier and more strained the higher she climbed.

He closed his eyes and reached out to Leia, to his mother, to Owen and Beru, to Obi-Wan and Anakin, even to Yoda, for even the recollection of the  _idea_ of strength.

 She was there, behind him.

 He slowly turned around and lowered his hood, every movement painful, unable to take in a satisfying breath.

 She was there, in front of him. Sad and strong, young and grown, his  _child_.

She reached into her satchel and pulled out a lightsaber ( _Anakin’s,_ he noticed, bewildered, his right arm twitching), holding it out to him with a pleading expression.

  _Pleading for what?_ he though _t._ _Does she recognize me?_

 He made his way down the slope to her, in a trance, and took the saber from her trembling hand with his left. His heart was beating so wildly he was sure it would burst and he would be consumed. He turned the saber over, snippets of old memories weaving their way across his mind rapidly. Delicately he transferred it to his right hand and held it out to her again. Her eyes caught on his prosthetic and they were suddenly filled with confusion, pain, and tears.

 “Rey,” he said, voice broken in every way it could be. “Rey. You’re -”

 She choked on a sob as she searched his face intently. He could see her face lighting up with recognition, recognition and betrayal and longing and fear. She was clearly having difficulty breathing.

 “Rey,” he tried again. “You’re alive.”

 She nodded, one of her arms lifting and her shaking hand extending out, as if she needed touch to believe what she was seeing.

 “Yes,” she whispered. “I’m alive. And you, you’re, please, I don’t know - ”

 “I’m your - ”

 “Family.”

 Luke nodded. He reached out with his own hand and brushed her rough fingers with his metal ones.

 “Yes, Rey,” he was whispering now, too. “I’m your family. I’m your father and you’re alive. My child you’re alive -”

 She threw her arms around his shoulders and he wound his arms around her waist ( _too thin, has she been eating, where has she been, she’s alive, she’s alive, my Rey, my daughter, my child)._

 “Father,” she said into the folds of his cloak.

The word sank into his bones, past all the years that had past, straight to the last of the white-ice that had frosted over ten years ago. He closed his eyes and remembered the sturdy sprouts in the muddy soil, the sleek black wings of the birds on the island, the dark warmth of his bird friend perched in his hair, and the ocean, ever loud and deep.

**Author's Note:**

> The first awakening he felt in the force was Finn and the second was Rey. Just in case it wasn't clear :)
> 
> Title comes from Shakespeare's "Macbeth", Act 3, Scene 4, Line 100.


End file.
